With the development of the Internet, the ability to communicate and/or conduct business over the Internet increased exponentially. Individuals could easily establish accounts via the Internet and communicate and/or conduct business using those online accounts. Early in the life of the Internet, the likelihood of a human engaging the Internet to create an account via a computing device was high. However, as the life of the Internet progressed, fraudulent software programs were developed by hackers that could imitate a human and create accounts intended for use by a human and implement those accounts to engage in fraudulent communication and/or business activities via the Internet. For example, fraudulent software programs were developed to create fraudulent email accounts with email providers to access each of the other email accounts associated with the email providers. The fraudulent software programs would then spam the other email accounts associated with the email providers from the fraudulent email accounts established by the fraudulent software programs.
In order to differentiate whether a human or a hacking computing device was attempting to establish online accounts, conventional Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) was developed. The hacking computing device is a computing device that attempts to fraudulently engage an application where a human is not the operator of the hacking computing device but rather a fraudulent software program is the operator of the hacking computing device. Applications are software programs that trigger a computing device to perform tasks that benefit a user. The applications differentiate from system software in that the system software manages and integrates a computing device's capabilities to execute the applications that in turn benefit the user.
Conventional CAPTCHA differentiated between the human or the hacking computing device attempting to engage an application by displaying a random combination of distorted letters and numbers via a user interface of the computing device that was attempting to engage the application. In order to engage the application, the user would be required to type the random letters and numbers depicted in the distorted image into the user interface. The application would enable the user to proceed to engage the application when the user was able to correctly type the combination of letters and numbers depicted by the distorted image into the user interface. However, the application prevents the user from engaging the application when the user fails to correctly type the combination of letters and numbers depicted by the distorted image into the user interface.
Typically, the fraudulent software program operating the hacking computing device is limited to recognizing text and cannot recognize distorted images of text. Particularly, fraudulent software programs that implemented Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs to recognize text struggle to recognize distorted images of text and are limited to recognizing standard characters that satisfied OCR programs. As a result, the hacking computing device typically fails to correctly type the combination of letters and numbers depicted by the distorted image into the user interface and is prevented from fraudulently engaging the application. However, typically a human can easily recognize the random combination of letters and numbers depicted by the distorted image and correctly type the combination of letters and numbers into the user interface. The human would then be allowed to engage the application.
However, the processing power of computing devices has increased exponentially in recent years. The increase in processing power has provided computing devices with the capability to depict conventional CAPTCHA phrases where the conventional CAPTCHA phrases slightly distort the random combination of letters and numbers displayed via the user interface. As a result, the fraudulent software program uses the processing power of hacking computing devices to recognize the conventional CAPTCHA phrases with slight distortion and then is able to correctly type the combination of letters and numbers into the user interface automatically. Because the combination of letters and numbers are correctly typed into the user interface, the application grants access to the fraudulent software program so that the fraudulent software program can fraudulently engage the application.
In response to the increased success rate of the fraudulent software program engaging the application due to the increase in processing power of computing devices and sophistication in fraudulent software programs, the conventional CAPTCHA phrases presented by the application have increased in complexity. The amount of distortion of the random combination of letters and numbers depicted in the distorted image is increased to provide additional difficulty for hacking computing devices to recognize the significantly distorted letters and numbers and correctly type the random combination of letters and numbers into the user interface. The increase in distortion requires a significant increase in the processing power for the hacking computing devices to successfully recognize the significantly distorted letters and numbers and prevents the fraudulent software program from fraudulently engaging the application.
However, an increase in the distortion of the random combination of letters and numbers depicted in the distorted image to prevent hacking computing devices from recognizing the combination of letters and numbers often results in the human user struggling to recognize the distorted letters and numbers as well. The random combination of letters and numbers depicted by the distorted image are often times so distorted that the human user struggles to recognize the distorted letters and numbers and fails to correctly type the letters and numbers into the user interface. The incorrect entry of the random combination of letters and numbers into the user interface prevents the human user from engaging the application. The human user may fail to correctly type the significantly distorted letters and numbers several times before successfully recognizing the combination of letters and numbers to engage the application. The added struggle to the human user increases the amount of time required to engage the application while frustrating the human user. With the continued increase of processing power of computing devices, conventional CAPTCHA phrases continue to have their distortion increased to prevent the fraudulent software program from fraudulently entering the application while also increasing the difficulty for human users to enter the application.